After reading Matt Gemmell’s thoughts on permalinks, I couldn’t help but be convinced that having the date in the URL is a bit, well dated. I do appreciate knowing when an article was published, but I put the publication date in the post itself — putting the date in the permalinks is ugly and redundant.

Changing the permalink structure on the site was a one line change to the _config.yml since this site is generated using Octopress. The fun part was creating a redirect in the nginx.conf so old links to my site won’t be broken. It was much simpler than I thought it would be:

rewrite ^/201[0-9]/\d\d/\d\d/(.*)/ /$1/ permanent;

I’ve only been writing on this site since 2013, so you may need to adjust the rewrite to match earlier years if you have posts from earlier than 2010.